Ric Ocasek and the Cars: Architecture Disguised as Pop

Most bands that matter fall into one of two camps — the ones critics love and regular people eventually catch up to, or the ones regular people love and critics eventually admit were right. The Cars were neither. They were a band everybody loved immediately and nobody fully understood until later.

Ric Ocasek, who died in September 2019 at 75, was the reason for both things.

The Songwriter Nobody Could Place

The Cars formed in Boston in the late 1970s from the wreckage of several earlier bands that Ocasek and bassist Benjamin Orr had been working through since Ohio. By the time they signed with Elektra and recorded their debut with Queen's producer Roy Thomas Baker, they had developed something genuinely unusual: a sound that satisfied punk fans and pop radio simultaneously without compromising either.

Ocasek wrote virtually everything. His method was what he called being obsessed with form and structure, but he pushed back on what that implied. "My way of songwriting — even if it seems overly obsessed with form and structure — is just as emotional to me as soul music may be to someone else," he told Rolling Stone in 1980. What he built were songs that sounded effortless and were architecturally precise. Every element was load-bearing. Nothing wandered.

The Cars pulled from rockabilly, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Lou Reed, surf rock, and the emerging synthesizer landscape of the late 1970s, and they made all of it sound like the same thing. That is not a common skill.

Two Voices, One Band

One of Ocasek's underrated decisions was sharing lead vocal duties with Orr. Ocasek's voice was deadpan, yelping, nervy — perfectly suited to the alienated, slightly abstract songs he wrote for himself. Orr had a warmer, more conventional rock voice, which is why he sang "Just What I Needed," "Let's Go," and "Drive." The split gave the band range it wouldn't have had otherwise, and it kept Ocasek's weirder instincts from dominating the commercial profile of the records.

When Orr died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, Ocasek said publicly that he didn't think The Cars could continue. He was right.

The Gear: Five Players Who Knew Exactly What They Wanted

The Cars were not a band that grabbed whatever was in the rehearsal room. Every member had specific, considered opinions about their equipment, and the collective gear choices explain a lot about why the band sounded the way they did.

Ocasek's primary studio guitar for most of the band's career was a 1974 Fender Jazzmaster he had repainted pink. He used it on virtually every Cars record. "I used it on this record a lot, and I use it on every record, all the time," he told Musician Magazine during the Shake It Up sessions. He also used a Fender Jaguar that Elliot Easton found at a pawn shop for $80 in 1980 — back when those guitars were considered unfashionable surf relics — as well as Gibson SGs and Les Pauls for studio warmth. His amp was an Ampeg V-4, chosen for its adjustable midrange, which let the rhythm guitar sit cleanly alongside the synths without crowding them. The pink Jazzmaster eventually became a fixture at Ocasek's personal studio, where Weezer recorded the Blue Album.

Easton is a different story entirely. One of the most underrated lead guitarists of the new wave era, he approached gear with the seriousness of a collector. For the debut album — recorded in twelve days in England — his entire setup was a 1977 Les Paul Standard refinished in red, a Fender Telecaster with a Bartolini mini-humbucker in the neck position, a Martin D-35 acoustic, a Morley Echo Volume pedal, and a Roland Chorus Ensemble. He cut all his parts, including the solos on "Just What I Needed" and "My Best Friend's Girl," in under two days. Easton ran his guitars through a Fender Twin and a rotating selection of Ampegs — a VT-22, V2, and V4. Later in his career he became known as a serious vintage and custom instrument collector, eventually designing a signature Gibson Les Paul Custom Shop model based on the question of what a 1964 Les Paul might have looked like if the single-cutaway design had never been discontinued. He had it built in Pelham Blue with black hardware, a tiki mascot on the headstock, and a chambered body for weight. Easton is left-handed, which made the vintage guitar hunt consistently difficult and made each acquisition more deliberate.

Greg Hawkes was the synthesizer engine. His main keyboard on the early Cars records was a Korg MiniKorg 700S monophonic synth, which he kept using throughout the band's entire run. The ARP Omni provided the string wash heard on tracks like "Moving in Stereo" and "All Mixed Up." By the Heartbeat City era in 1984, Hawkes and Ocasek were working with a Fairlight CMI — the 16-bit sampling synthesizer used on tracks like "Hello Again" — alongside a Roland Jupiter-8, a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, a PPG Wave 2, a Memorymoog, Yamaha DX7 and DX9, and a Synclavier on the subsequent tour. The keyboard rig grew with the decade, tracking every significant synthesizer development of the era in real time. Hawkes had attended Berklee College of Music and brought a composer's sensibility to the instrument stack — he wasn't chasing sounds, he was building them.

Benjamin Orr played bass with a precision that suited the locked-in rhythm section the band required. David Robinson, who had come up through Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers, anchored everything with a drummer's understanding of how to serve a pop song rather than dominate one.

What the Production Was Actually Doing

The debut was recorded with Roy Thomas Baker, who had produced Queen's most operatic records. The choice sounds counterintuitive — Baker's instinct was maximalism, and The Cars were about restraint. But Baker understood how to make a recording sound expensive and immediate at the same time. The result was one of the fastest-selling debut albums in Elektra's history.

Ocasek eventually moved toward producing the band's later records himself, and brought that same architectural discipline to his outside work. He produced Weezer's Blue Album, Bad Brains, Bad Religion, Guided by Voices, and Hole — a list that has no obvious stylistic center except Ocasek's insistence on precision and hooks.

Why He Gets Underrated

Ocasek was tall, wore dark glasses, dressed in black, and looked like a figure from a different era. The image was cool in a way that didn't invite analysis. The Cars had so many genuine radio hits that the work got absorbed into the background of the decade rather than studied.

But the songwriting holds up in a way that reveals how much was going on underneath. "Just What I Needed" is built on three chords but the arrangement is immaculate. "Drive" is almost entirely atmosphere — no real chorus to speak of — and it's one of the most emotionally devastating songs of the 1980s. "Candy-O" takes a bare blues structure and strips it down until only the tension is left.

The Cars were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, a year before Ocasek died. At the ceremony they played together publicly for the last time. Ocasek looked exactly the same as he had in 1978.

He was an architect who made his blueprints sound like instinct. That is the hardest thing to do in pop music, and he did it for a decade straight.

Explore The Cars, the Fender Jazzmaster, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, and new wave on Sonic City.